I had expected the bank visit to settle something.
Instead, it had made me aware of how much remained unresolved.
Before the visit, I had wondered whether the check could be real.
Afterward, I had a reason to believe it was legitimate, but I still had to wait for the bank to finish its review.
That was progress.
It simply wasn't the kind of progress I had imagined.
I wanted the situation to become straightforward.
I wanted to know what would happen next.
And I wanted to understand why Grandma had chosen to give so much money to the people in our family.
The last question stayed with me longest.
I could understand a gift.
I could understand a person wanting to help relatives.
What I struggled to understand was the scale of the decision and the fact that several of us had been included.
I didn't know whether the checks represented equal amounts.
I knew only the amount written on mine.
I had no reliable information about the others beyond the fact that they had received checks.
It would have been easy to fill those gaps with assumptions.
I could have imagined Grandma making a list of relatives and deciding what each person needed.
I could have imagined a private calculation, a conversation, or a reason she had never shared with me.
But none of those pictures came from anything I knew.
They were simply ways of making the unknown feel less empty.
I had to stop doing that.
My grandmother had lived a life I had never fully examined.
I knew her through the role she played in mine.
That was not the same as knowing everything about her circumstances.
It was a difficult thing to admit.
I had thought familiarity meant understanding.
Now I could see that familiarity sometimes meant knowing which details never needed explaining because they had always been there.
Her handwriting.
Her name.
The ordinary fact of being her grandson.
Those things were familiar.
The amount on the check was not.
I kept returning to the signature because it connected the strange financial situation to the woman I knew.
The bank could compare it with the signature card.
I could recognize it with my own eyes.
Neither fact explained the decision.
But together, they made it harder for me to dismiss the check as a misunderstanding.
I wondered how Grandma had felt when she wrote it.
Had she hesitated?
Had she considered the reaction it might cause?
Had she expected the family to understand immediately?
I couldn't answer any of those questions.
I wasn't even sure whether she had anticipated the confusion.
It was tempting to think that a person making such a significant decision would have considered every possible consequence.
But I had no way of knowing what she had considered.
I could only see what she had done.
She had written a check in my name.
She had written checks for other relatives.
And she had set in motion a process that now required the bank's attention.
That was the situation in front of me.
I had to let it remain that simple until I learned more.
The thought didn't make me less curious.
It made me more careful.
I didn't want the size of the check to turn me into someone who treated guesses as facts.
I didn't want the possibility of money to become more important than the truth about how it had come into my life.
And I didn't want to pretend I understood Grandma merely because I recognized her signature.
Those were things I could control.
The bank's review would take whatever time it needed.
The questions about my grandmother would have to wait for answers I could actually trust.
I had no choice but to accept that.
Click here to continue reading: PART 8: I Finally Stopped Trying to Guess What Grandma Wanted and Faced the Only Thing I Could Honestly Say About Her Check
I Thought My Grandmother’s Six-Million-Dollar Check Had to Be a Mistake Until the Bank Manager Looked Me in the Eye
Part 7 of 20
